A student's guide to baking

Posts tagged ‘Cream’

Preheat the oven to 220ºC and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

In a saucepan, heat the butter and water together over a medium heat until the butter melts. Bring the mixture to the boil before immediately removing from the heat.

Add in the flour when you take the mixture off the heat and stir vigorously and continuously with a wooden spoon until it forms a soft ball. Cook over a low heat for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Remove from the heat once more and leave the mixture to cool. Add the eggs, beating each one in fully without adding the next, to create a shiny and smooth paste.

Using a piping bag, pipe the pastry into 3.5cm wide discs.

Bake at 220ºC for 8 minutes and then at 180ºC for 8 minutes. Turn off the oven and leave the pastry inside with door ajar for a further 5 minutes.

Once the choux pastry has finished in the oven, take the buns out and leave them on a wire rack to cool completely.

Whip the cream until it starts to thicken and hold its shape a little. At this point, add in the orange zest and then continue whipping the cream until it forms stiff peaks.

Garnish the tops with halved strawberries.

Despite the fact that neither of us had ever made choux pastry before, my girlfriend Ele and I decided one afternoon to have a go at making chocolate éclairs. Sadly we didn’t quite get it right the first time and the pastry didn’t rise as much as it should, so we ended up with éclair buns that were a bit thinner and wider than they ought to have been. We covered them in chocolate ganache and cream regardless and they still tasted just as good.

Choux pastry isn’t too complicated when it comes to the ingredients, so we decided to have another go, which yielded more successful results. Having already used a lot of the chocolate we’d planned on turning into the ganache, we changed tactics and decided to make a more simpler choux pastry bun and use some of the fruit I had instead.

It’s a fairly simple recipe, and a good one for starting off with choux pastry, as it doesn’t require quite the same structural integrity and perfect appearance that you have with an éclair. It’s also one that you can easily tailor to whatever fruit you prefer or just happen to have in the kitchen at the time. Using lighter summer fruit flavours tends to work better with the gentleness of the choux pastry, so I’d recommend at least sticking to that to begin with.

When chatting to Becky, one of my closest friends, a couple of months ago, we realised that despite having spoken about our respective baking endeavours on many an occasion, we’d never actually baked together. We’d shared ideas, recipes and tips, but we figured it was about time that we made something together rather than just talk about it. Given that I’m now out of the country on my Year Abroad, and I’m not going to be spending much time in the UK for the next 12 months or so, we settled on a date.

And so we baked. We’d spent some time deliberating over what we wanted to make, eventually settling on éclairs because Becky had never worked with choux pastry before, and I wanted to have a go at éclairs! (Plus they’d be easier to divide up afterwards.)

We did the usual things one does when baking: getting flour all over the hob, coating the walls in icing sugar, eating any remaining mixture that was sadly left unused at the bottom of the bowls… (I see you with your judging eyes, don’t pretend you don’t do it too.) We even ended up making a bit too much of the coffee cream filling, so once we’d finished baking, we treated ourselves to some chocolate-infused coffee with the leftover cream added for good measure and an éclair each.

I particularly enjoyed baking with Becky, because it sort of brought things full circle for me. She and another good friend from home, Charlotte, were the ones who about this time last year kept telling me to watch The Great British Bake Off until I finally caved into the pressure and agreed to watch the first episode of the new series. Looking back, I’m very glad I did. Since then, I’ve become hooked on the show and been inspired to start baking, much to the delight of my family and friends. One year later, and here I am!

Preheat the oven to 220ºC. On a piece of baking paper, draw eight circles 5cm wide and eight circles 2.5cm wide, and use it to line a baking tray

In a saucepan, heat the butter and water together over a medium heat until the butter melts. Bring the mixture to the boil before immediately removing from the heat.

Add in the flour when you take the mixture off the heat and stir vigorously and continuously with a wooden spoon until it forms a soft ball. Cook over a low heat for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Remove from the heat once more and leave the mixture to cool. Add the eggs, beating each one in fully before adding the next, to create a shiny and smooth paste.

Spoon the mixture into a piping bag with a 1.5cm nozzle and pipe round discs onto the baking tray in the marked circle. Dampen your finger and gentle smoothen the top of each disc.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 10 minutes at 220ºC, then reduce the temperature to 190ºC and bake for a further 10-15 minutes. Remove the choux pastry buns from the oven and pierce each with a skewer to allow the steam and heat to escape. Turn the oven off and put the choux buns back in for 4-5 minutes to dry. Remove once more from the oven and leave them to cool.

For the crème pâtissière:

Add the milk and vanilla seeds to a saucepan and gradually bring to the boil. Once the mixture has started to boil, remove from the heat and leave it to cool for 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks and caster sugar together until pale, then add in the cornflour and plain flour to the mixture. Combine with the vanilla-flavoured milk and whisk continuously.

Bring the mixture back to the boil over a medium heat whilst continuing to whisk and cook for 1 minute.

Pour the crème pâtissière into a bowl and cover it with cling film, as doing so will prevent it from forming a skin. Put the bowl in the fridge to cool.

For the chocolate ganache icing:

Bring the double to a boil in small pan, and then remove from the heat.

Add in the chocolate and stir consistently until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is shiny.

Transfer the mixture to a bowl and leave in the fridge to cool until the ganache is thick but still spreadable.

For the cream collar:

Whip the double cream in a bowl until peaks start to form.

To assemble the religieuse:

Spoon the crème pâtissière into a piping bag with a long thin nozzle, and use it to fill the buns.

With a teaspoon, gently spread the chocolate ganache over the top of each bun, using the ganache to help keep the smaller bun on top of the larger.

Spoon the cream for the collar into a piping bag with a star shaped nozzle. Pipe a collar of cream around the joining point between the two buns.

Now, I must be honest with you here and tell you that when I first tried to make these, my crème pâtissière really didn’t work as I’d hoped. As you can see, the mixture was far too thin, as the milk I was using had too high a water content and too low a fat content. I have since learnt the error of my ways. One of the things I also took from the experience was that with some things, no amount of whisking is going to make them thick enough to resemble cream in any form, and you’ll just end up with a vanilla-flavoured milk substance that refuses to change texture.

Please don’t tell Mary Berry!

I was first introduced to religieuses, as with many baked goods, through The Great British Bake Off, and I loved the concept. As a long-time lover of profiteroles, the idea of stacking them seemed like genius. I will admit, the fact that the name is French may have also been a contributing factor in my love for these delicacies, especially because of the wonderful attempts at pronouncing the name made by the various GBBO contestants and presenters.

The French name, for the finished good as well as the choux pastry and crème pâtissière, made this recipe a clear forerunner when it came to deciding what to bake for a French tea party. (Yes, French tea party. I’ll explain.) Once the words ‘tea party’ had been mentioned, I naturally felt an obligation to don my apron and bake something for the occasion. Hence the French connection to religieuses.

At the end of my second year studying French and German at Oxford, our French language tutor offered to host our final class in her flat nearby. Given that it was the end of the year and we were preparing to go off on our Years Abroad, our only task was to produce a hilariously bad translation of a pop song, which we then read to each other at said tea party. I appreciate that to those of you who don’t have much to do with translation this may not sound like the most fun experience ever, but when you’ve made some pretty creative but ultimately wrong word choices and produced horrific contortions of both English and French, laughing at deliberately bad attempts is somewhat therapeutic.

To aid in our therapy therefore, our tutor very kindly provided us with a miniature feast. She made brownies, banana cake and flapjack for us, so with the religieuses as well we were rather spoilt for choice! What these photos do lack sadly is some sense of perspective, but know that these nuns were rather large. Thankfully the other French students at my college came along at the end to help us out with the cornucopia we’d found ourselves with.